Saturday 17 January 2009

Satyam Shivam Sundaram...

Satyam Shivam Sundaram, which means a beautiful truth in the form of God, was an below average 1978 bollywood movie which faced critiques and initial hiccups to get through the censor board. But this was not the case for a company "Satyam". Start of 2009 saw the chairman and chief executive of one of India’s biggest outsourcing groups, Satyam Computer Services, confess to fixing the company’s books in a $1bn fraud described as the country’s “Enron”. This had taken the entire India Inc by surprise and comes as a shock to many. Once a role model and hero for many in the end turned out to be a fraud. The shareholders, clients and more importantly the earnings of 50,000+ employees were at stake. As the satyam fraud started unfolding, more and more people started coming into the picture. PwC the auditor of the firm, were immediately taken out and KPMG and Deloitte where assigned the necessary roles. How can one man create such a huge mess and get unnoticed? I am sure the story goes beyond that !!
Is money everything? It's a debatable topic, but yes money is important. Common lets be honest - it's a means of living. I set out to question what the hell money is and what it does to the different classes of people. I set out to find out what other people thought about all this. I set out to prove that there was something to be learnt by looking at all this closely. How do we ensure that Ethics in decision making, Character Ethics and Corporate Governance are always maintained at highest levels? Even incentives will eventually involve money, but will that stop from cases like Enron, Bofors Scandal, the Satyam debacle to occur?! The point to ponder on is how do you and we all in this society would act to this situation.

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